They had her in stitches

Every town has its official gossip - the official chronicler of all the romances and weddings and divorces and births and foolin' around that goes on. She (face it, it's usually a woman who writes all the gossip. Men KNOW it but never commit it to paper) has friends all over the place who fill her in.

The New York City version of this reporter is Cindy Adams, widow of comic Joey Adams, and she writes a column in the New York POST fishwrap, so her words get out to many more people than, say, a hairdresser in Bugtussle.

Cindy is 94 years of age now, but still getting around well and she's always up for something new...such as finishing high school.

It's not like she quit school to run off and play the south end of a horse in a costume party. She was not allowed to finish because she did not sew her graduation gown!

She said she was "stunned" one day last week to be receiving that diploma "800 years too late."

Cindy was attending Andrew Jackson High School in Cambria Heights in Queens but, “In those days, we had a thing called Home Ec., short for Home Economics. I had a 90-something average, I graduated in three years instead of four but I couldn’t sew the dress.”

It was a requirement for women in the class to sew their grad gown. Cindy could not do that, but her mother took it to a professional tailor. The principal saw this the ruse and said, "She didn’t make this dress. She doesn’t graduate. She doesn’t get a diploma. She can’t go to college.”

So Cindy's friends, including "Judge Judy" Sheindlin, the mayor, the governor, and the president of the American Federation of Teachers all showed up to toss praise her way.

“If you had had that opportunity to graduate, you could have gone onto college,” Governor Kathy Hochul pointed out.

Cindy was born in 1930, so all this took place in the late 1940s, which is not all that long ago, comparatively. Imagine a school district having a stupid rule like this today!

And I wonder if there was a similar requirement for the boys in the class, but I think we know the answer, don't we?